Filed for bankruptcy in the past six months? Had medical bills you couldn’t pay in the past two years? Been a victim of domestic violence? Received a shut-off notice from a utility company? If you don’t want to buy insurance under Obamacare, you don’t have to. No penalty.

The individual mandate may be the most despised part of Obamacare, but the reality is that it’s much smaller than people think. It’s riddled with exemptions, hardships and other loopholes that allow millions of people off the hook for enrollment by March 31.

Some exceptions are part of the law. Some were added to quell political fires.

If you had a plan that was canceled and think the alternative costs too much, you get a pass. And it’s not an out just for this first rough year. According to a decision this month by the administration, you may be able to escape the obligation of the mandate for the rest of the Obama presidency — if you can deal with the paperwork.

If you are one of the several million low-income people who would qualify for Medicaid expansion — but your state opted out of expansion — you won’t be required to buy coverage.

These and other changes to the mandate encapsulate many of the challenges the administration has faced during the four years of implementation since the Affordable Care Act law was passed.

The White House needs the mandate to make its policies work, as it creates new insurance markets operating under new rules.

It needs the exemptions to make the politics work — or at least to take the edge off some of the sharpest political backlash, like the outcry over the canceled plans that people had been told they could keep.

From the start, the Affordable Care Act mandate — or as the White House calls it, “the individual shared responsibility” — had outs. People who really couldn’t afford health care wouldn’t have to buy it under criteria spelled out in the law. Polls have shown that the message never got through to large portions of the population, and the anger over the mandate combined with objections to the costs contributed to the persistent antagonism to the “government intrusion” of the law.

Rejection of the mandate animated the tea party, sparked the Supreme Court challenge, was a pivot point in the government shutdown and led to multiple House GOP votes to repeal or delay it, including votes just this month.

But the breadth of the exemptions could cause other problems. There’s that three-year allowance for canceled plans. And there’s hardship exemption No. 14: “You experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance. Please submit documentation if possible.”

The Republicans are gleefully claiming that if the administration is handing get-out-of-mandate free cards to anybody who wants one, the Democrats should join them and repeal the darn thing.

“There’s a real question whether the White House has abandoned the individual mandate — the heart of Obamacare itself,” House Speaker John Boehner said recently. “The White House quietly added a new hardship exemption for everyone, and it seems like they’re hoping no one will notice.”

Health law backers say the GOP is exaggerating the changes, but that doesn’t mean some aren’t worrying about whether it’s been too watered down. Tim Jost, a well-known health lawyer who backs the law, said the vagueness of some exemptions troubles him.

“Can I say, ‘I don’t like the options available,’ or ‘I’d rather spend my money on whatever,’” he said. “I just don’t understand where they are going with these very wide-open hardship exemptions, and I think they are opening the door to some real mischief.”

Insurers, which priced their policies based on the expectation that the mandate will drive otherwise reluctant (and relatively healthy) people into their plans, are watching closely for any further erosion. Premiums could soar without healthy customers to balance the cost of covering sicker people with pre-existing conditions, now required by law.

“The insurance market reforms included in the ACA are inextricably linked to the individual mandate,” said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans. “Broad exemptions to the individual mandate undermine the stability of the marketplace and could lead to disruption and higher costs for consumers.”

Investment analysts at Deutsche Bank worry that “coverage mandates may not apply to the majority of the U.S. population for at least the 2014-2015 time frame” with risks for the insurance industry and the president’s coverage goals. Insurance stocks, on the other hand, have generally been doing well as enrollment has climbed.

The Congressional Budget Office never thought many people would actually be hit with a fine. In 2012, it estimated that 6 million people would face penalties in 2016 — out of 30 million uninsured. Millions would be exempt, largely on affordability grounds. But millions more would have health coverage, through Obamacare or other insurance, so they wouldn’t face any fine.

In Massachusetts, where the state health reform law and its mandate are not a perfect comparison but the closest available, less than 1 percent of the population, or 44,000 people, paid penalties in 2011. About 7,100 had exemptions.

The CBO still sees the ACA mandate, even a shrunken one, as crucial to making the health law enrollment work. The budget agency’s recent analysis of a House GOP bill to delay the mandate for five years, found that coverage would be slashed by more than half from 25 million to 12 million without it in 2018.

Federal officials say the fuss is overblown by critics like Boehner. They say they still intend to enforce the mandate and to review and evaluate each application for an exemption.

“The penalty will be applied for people who can afford insurance coverage who chose not to sign up during open enrollment,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House panel earlier in March, seeking to dispense with speculation that it won’t be enforced. “The penalty will be assessed on taxes in 2015.”

Nor do health officials think that many people with the canceled plans will really exercise the option to duck coverage. Those people had insurance before, and are likely to buy it again. The hardship designation does allow them to purchase a slimmed-down catastrophic policy that was designed primarily for younger Americans.

And those who do seek to get themselves exempted will face some hurdles. Brian Haile, senior vice president for health policy at Jackson Hewitt, which is incorporating a lot of health insurance advice and referrals in this year’s tax season, said just the paperwork required to claim the hardship exemption would be all but prohibitive to many people. He also said he has no doubt that the administration plans to enforce the mandate, and that’s what tax preparers are telling their clients.

Still, the Obama administration doesn’t stress the unpopular mandate much in its outreach for enrollment. Ads for HealthCare.gov and other official promotions often cite the March 31 application deadline primarily as a warning about a lost opportunity rather than the potential consequences for missing it. The message is far more carrot than stick.

That’s not true everywhere. In some states that are running their own exchanges, including New York, Connecticut and Minnesota, officials are not shying away from telling consumers that they have to sign up or pay up. Enroll America, the largest private Obamacare outreach group, has begun reminding people in the final weeks to sign up to avoid a fine, although the focus remains on the message that financial assistance is available, spokesman Justin Nisly said.

The mandate itself doesn’t really need the publicity. While half or more of the uninsured still don’t know that subsidies are available to offset the cost of coverage, the mandate has no such problem. About four in five Americans know about the requirement to have insurance or pay a fine, according to polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That makes it about the best known — if least liked — provision in the law.